King of the jungle: Eating ants and driven close to madness, Harry Holcroft goes to amazing lengths to paint the rainforests

Artist Harry Holcroft's adventures have taken him from the Spice Route to the Silk Route

The effortless economy of his packing is what boggles me most: artist Harry Holcroft set off on a painting expedition to the world's great tropical rainforests carrying less than the rest of us would take for a weekend in the Cotswolds.

While Stanley famously went in search of Livingstone with a retinue of 352 men bearing supplies and a collapsible boat, Harry travels with minimal encumbrance. 'I just take my "toy box",' he says, 'a briefcase containing three or four sketch books, watercolours and pencils, a very basic medical kit and a silk cocoon in which I sleep.

'Everyone thinks you have to go into the jungle armed with knives, daggers and blunderbusses and wearing great canvas jackets, but mosquitoes can bite through canvas. They don't bite through silk, though. So at night I step into my cocoon and tie a knot from the inside over my head. I don't mind where I sleep - under a tree, in a mud hut. I'm very robust.'

A long experience of jungle warfare - he served for 25 years with the Household Cavalry before he was invalided out and decided to pursue art full-time - has prepared him for the privations and hazards of rainforest exploration.

He makes little of the fact that he has vascular necrosis, a disease that causes bone disintegration, and has had both hips and each leg, down to the knees, rebuilt with titanium. 'Before long I'll be completely bionic!' he jokes.

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But why did Harry choose as his subject matter the impenetrable jungles of Central and South America, Africa, India and South-East Asia? 'I wanted to paint the rainforest partly because there's no perspective, no vanishing point, no logic to the play of light. You have to create order out of chaos; that's the challenge.

'During my travels through Africa to Central and South America, I'd also seen the scale of the destruction of the rainforests. In the Amazon a stretch of forest a mile wide and equivalent of the distance from London to Basingstoke is disappearing every day due to forest clearance to produce beef and soya. I was haunted by this devastation. It made me determined to capture the essence of these dwindling forests.'

Harry's rainforest paintings, on exhibition in London this month, are complemented by a book: Rainforest: Light And Spirit. His illustrations and diary entries are illuminated by a text from Professor Sir Ghillean Prance about the rainforests' role in stabilising the climate. Prince Charles, who has written a foreword, calls the book, 'A powerful advocate and call to arms.'

Harry, who travelled with a local guide and occasionally solo, lived as the indigenous tribes do, eating rainforest snacks that make the staples of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! seem relatively appetising. 'In one Brazilian tribe, the children peel palm stalks, fill their hollow cavities with palm oil then stick them in the ground overnight. In the morning they've turned pink with red ants, which crawl on to them to get to the oil.

The children eat the ants from the stalk like candyfloss. I joined them. They taste quite pleasantly peppery,' he says.

One night, despite his military background, he succumbed to a terror so profound he could only dispatch it by drinking the entire bottle of whisky from which he'd intended to take a nightcap. He'd decided to sleep alone in the jungle in Bolivia. His guide, Orvieto, went home. Alone as dusk transformed into a night of inky blackness, he was besieged by fears.

'The rainforest is absolutely silent in the day. As soon as darkness falls, it screams, howls and wails. The cacophony is like Dante's Inferno,' he says. 'One night alone there is enough to send anyone mad. The imagination takes over. Every time you feel something land on your leg, you think, "Oh God, what is it?" Every "urgh" and "grrr" is magnified by your imagination. You start to believe you're going to be torn apart by baboons or eaten by jaguars.

'And so the fear built up like a pressure-cooker. I became convinced I'd be eaten alive. The only way I could last the night was by numbing the senses.' Was this horror enough to send him scuttling back to civilisation? Apparently not. Neither did an encounter with a leech pit, from which thousands of 'repulsive, twisting blood-suckers, slimy and vibrating like maggots' emerged to fasten on to his torso.

The encounter threw him into a 'blur of horror, revulsion and panic,' he records in his diaries. Only when he was pinned to the ground and smothered in salt did the leeches disperse.

But his enthusiasm for the rainforest remains. 'I like stumbling round jungles and deserts. I can't stand cities. They make me feel utterly ill,' says father-of-four Harry, 57, whose wife, Sarah, is used to him returning from his travels - his painting tours have taken him on the Slave Route, the Spice Route and the Silk Route - in clothes stiff with dirt. (She now insists he cleans up in a hotel before entering the house.)

The Holcrofts have homes in central London and Provence, France, where, in his studio, Harry works his sketches into evocative paintings. In addition, his botanical drawings provide an insight into the jungle's indigenous plant life. He drew the hallucinogenic angel's trumpet, a plant that grows wild in Bolivia, where he also experienced its potent effects.

'I visited a shaman. He wore a headdress of macaw feathers, a necklace of claws, shells and fish teeth, a sarong and yellow gumboots that looked as if they'd been bought in Woolworths.

'I stripped naked and he covered me in a muddy paste made of witchhazel, cat's claw and soul vine. It was like some potion fermented by Macbeth's witches. The paste burned into my skin. Then he gave me a small cupful of angel's trumpet, which tastes like mud. He started to chant a dirge-like mantra. By then I was off to Planet Zog. After an hour of this " treatment", you no longer care about your ailments!'

Harry's compulsion to travel is quite probably inherited. His late mother Gabrielle, a concert pianist, was raised in India in a house with 40 servants. Her childhood pets were two leopards. His father Oliver, a Ghurka officer, served in Burma during the war. It was he who persuaded Harry, newly graduated from Oxford where he read economics, to join the Army.

However, his real passion was art - he studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford while taking his degree - but he found an outlet for his creative talent in the armed forces. His first Commanding Officer, Andrew Parker Bowles, encouraged him to paint during an early posting in Kyrenia, northern Cyprus.

His next tour will take him to the South Seas where Gauguin worked. 'There are only a few places on the planet I haven't visited, and all of them are cold,' he says. 'I could never explore the Arctic. My legs retain the cold like refrigerators because of the titanium in them. So I plan to end my days in the warm, in India.

'Meanwhile, I'll always be a free spirit. I'll continue to paint and travel the world.'

An exhibition of Harry Holcroft's work is at Artspace Galleries, Maddox Street, London W1 from Monday until Saturday 15 November. His website is harryholcroft.com. To order a copy of his book, Rainforest: Light And Spirit for £19.50 (plus £3.50 p&p) call 01394 389977 or email sales@antique-acc. com, quoting 'Daily Mail reader offer'.